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Say which services matter, without a redeploy

avuru obs team
Maintainers

Deciding that payments is your most critical service used to mean editing values.yaml, running helm upgrade, and holding the cluster permissions to do it. So in practice it never happened: the Service Health board showed one auto-discovered group per namespace and the tier lanes sat empty. Groups are now authored in the app.

  • Settings → Groups. Create a group from a name, a criticality tier (T0–T3) and the namespaces or services it covers; edit or delete it later. The change applies to the next health read — no restart, no redeploy, no PR. The Service Health board links straight to the editor instead of naming a config key.

  • Auto-grouping still works. Services no group claims keep falling into their namespace at the default tier, exactly as before, so nothing disappears while you organize.

  • Groups declared in the chart keep working, and win. They render read-only, because an install that manages its groups in Git must not have them quietly overridden from a browser. The conflict is refused when you try to save it, rather than discovered at the next upgrade — and if the chart later claims a name you already authored, that group is flagged as overridden instead of silently ceasing to group anything.

  • Alerting and the board cannot disagree. The two sources are merged in one place shared by the health API and the alert evaluator. That matters because the evaluator does not read the API: merging anywhere else would have meant a group you created showing as critical on the board while nothing ever paged on it. A test drives both paths and then fires a real rule on a group that exists only in the database.

  • Safe by construction. Writes are admin-only and validated against the same rules the chart config is checked with at startup, so nothing you can save here will fail the hub's next boot. Everyone else can read the definitions — seeing how the estate is organized is not a privilege.

Thresholds, critical edges and the default tier stay in serviceGroups for now; groups are the part people need daily.